A Midsummer Day's Dream

between awake and asleep, and the sun is shining, softly permeating my eyelids along the unremitting reel of highway Mundania,

and I have the time and permission and lack of anything else

to succumb to a daydream,

to let myself fabricate the brief what's-been and the boundless what-could-be

with a person I've met but don't really know,

a person I've kissed but whose face I can't really remember,

because after two brief liquor-dizzy rendezvous

my mind's image of her is distorted as if on the bottom of a pool,

and my recollection of her isn't a continuous narrative or comprehensive picture

but instead a series of seemingly insignificant but evidently memorable moments and gestures,

mere mental GIFs whose motion remains the same but whose meaning is ever evolving and intensifying,

the same snippets that played last weekend on a plane, when I'm thinking of her,

not with the longing of a serious relationship or the emptiness of one lost

but instead with whimsical anticipation, a feeling that's at once safe and exhilarating, both juvenile and profound, like a character in a Wes Anderson movie, and I try once again to recall her face,

which feels like digging up a time capsule,

dusting it off,

spinning in circles a dozen times,

examining it for two seconds,

describing aloud what I see,

then putting it in a blender and seeing if it tastes like what I remember,

which I know doesn't really make sense, but neither does the fact that her face, the one I know is beautiful but elusive and shrouded in my mind, appears somewhere between "seatbacks" and "tray tables" and, like Mufasa in the clouds or Jesus on a potato chip, emerges in my diluted Sprite,

and suddenly her lips feel permanently branded on mine,

so I'm thinking to myself, if this plane crashed,

I'd go down thinking about her,

not because I love her but because maybe I could have and wouldn't that be convenient?